The cast of “The Tempest” on site at the park. Courtesy of Franconia Sculpture Park

The fall theater season is set to hit full swing in the coming weeks but before these last warm nights of summer give way to fall, I’d recommend catching the collaborative, open-air production of “The Tempest” this weekend at Franconia Sculpture Park. Two big names in the Twin Cities’ scene are spearheading the effort: Theatre de la Jeune Lune co-founder Barbra Berlovitz and actor/director Harry Waters Jr. will co-direct and perform in this gender-switching, racially diverse iteration of Shakespeare’s classic tale of magic, ambition, love lost and regained.

The cast includes: Barbra Berlovitz as Caliban and Harry Waters Jr. as Prospero, as well as Ki Seung Rhee (Antonio); Tamara Clark (Sebastian); Joetta Wright (Miranda); Bree Schmidt (Ferdinand); Ed Euclide (Trinculo); Andi Cheney (Gonzalo); Alex Stene (Alonso); Paul Stucker (Stephano); and ShaVunda Horsely (Ariel), with Sara Truesdale, Mason Mahoney and Alec Lambert as “the Quality.”

In an interview with MinnPost’s Pamela Espeland, Waters says, in addition to funding support from Minnesota Arts Board and a Cultural Community Partnership grant, they’ve called on various local performing arts organizations for help pulling off this weekend’s al fresco production. They’re using costumes and props from St. Paul’s Macalester College (where Waters is a professor of theater and dance), handmade masks from Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, and are getting technical support from the team at Bedlam Theatre. And the artists at Franconia are putting them up for the week, housing and feeding the cast and crew while they prepare for the opening on Thursday evening. Waters says several of the park’s visual artists have also made work for the show. The monumental sculptures installed at the park seem to me a wonderfully surreal and suitably grand backdrop for the bard’s epic fable of family ambition, romance gone awry and redemption.

This unusual production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” will run Thursday, Friday and Saturday, September 4 through 6, in and around the grounds of Franconia Sculpture Park, 29836 St. Croix Trail, Shafer, Minnesota (about an hour’s drive from St. Paul). Tickets are $10 (for kids 5 and under, it’s $5), and you should reserve them online. Arrive at the park by 6 p.m. and wear comfortable shoes for walking and bring a blanket to sit on, as audiences will need to follow the production as it moves through the park. The show has about an hour-and-a-half runtime and begins each night of the production’s run at 6:30 p.m. For more information, visit Franconia Sculpture Park’s website at www.franconia.org/tempest.html.